One afternoon four years ago, my then boyfriend strides into the den where I'm reading a book and shows me a gun. A metallic silver handgun still wrapped in its original plastic, it lies there, impotent, in a small metal lock box, but it terrifies me anyway. My boyfriend, who I'll call R., lifts the top of the box gingerly, like he's displaying a rare and delicate treasure, a Fabergé egg that might shatter if jostled. He wants me to know there's a gun in the house. I wonder when he decided he needed it, where he bought it, whether he applied for a permit to render the thing legitimate. Is owning a gun in Los Angeles even legal? Then, growing irritated, I ask myself: How did he manage to do this without my knowledge?

I'd never seen an actual gun, except in the holsters of police officers. To my mind, guns were verboten, menacing, violent. They were unpredictable contraptions beloved of white supremacists or paranoid meth heads in creepy desert hideouts. My formative years were spent in Illinois, where gun control laws have long been some of the strictest in the nation. I lived in a middle-class suburb, where mall-going was the chief recreational pastime and there wasn't a culture of hunting or shooting for sport. My mother, who raised my two sisters and me alone, was a champion worrier—she forbade us to ride in cars if there was so much as a hint of "precipitation" and hired babysitters for us until I was well into high school, to my great dismay. But she certainly didn't keep a gun at home for protection. Whenever she heard a suspicious late-night noise, a creak or crash that convinced her someone was climbing through a basement window or lurking around our deck, she called George, the sturdy, mustachioed cop who lived with his young family across the street, to sweep through the house and give her the all-clear.

Surprised as I was to see R. with a gun, I understood his desire for protection. Nine months earlier, at 9 a.m. on an ordinary Sunday in Santa Monica, I'd walked into the office we rented together to find it had been burglarized. The intruder had somehow tunneled through three layers of sophisticated security: an electronically coded front door, the Medeco bolt outside our suite, and the more basic lock to our office proper. The third door he'd ruptured with a crowbar; splinters of wood lay scattered across the nubby carpet. As if this weren't sinister enough, R., a scholar of Islam who wrote incendiary books and articles and often appeared on cable TV news shows, was singled out: Our offices had been ransacked top to bottom—my laptop was missing, as were many of R.'s most sensitive documents—while the computers and expensive art belonging to the film executives who shared our suite had been left untouched. More disconcerting still, I'd been at the office until 2 a.m. the previous night, attempting to meet a deadline. Whoever had done this had utilized, exactly, the seven hours of my absence. It seemed likely that they (when the police detective came, he said that damage this extensive was almost surely the work of a they) had been watching me until I left. What if I'd walked in on them?

I became plagued by nightmares and apprehension. I feared that R. and I were being followed. When I saw an unfamiliar Lincoln Town Car idling in the alley behind our apartment building, I was certain "they" were staking us out. I worried that the intruders hadn't found what they came for and would return for it. Next time (a next time seemed inevitable) the crime would be far worse, some atrocity that even my overheated mind couldn't conjure up.

R., for his part, was blithely unconcerned about the whole incident—or at least he acted like it. Later, I reflected that this posture allowed him to continue with his work, the perils of which he had to ignore so he could concentrate. But he also hadn't walked in on the grim aftermath alone, as I had: the succession of broken locks, the bludgeoned door, the disheveled drawers and file cabinets, the ecosystem of the place irrevocably damaged.

Yet R. was right that I suffered from a certain chronic paranoia—the legacy, very likely, of all that maternal fretting. (Another example: My mother asked relatives who visited me as a baby to don bandannas as face masks.) This bleak, anxious disposition of mine was aggravated by a rash of criminal acts I'd suffered in the preceding decade. To recount them all sounds absurd, like I'm a shameless exaggerator or a pathological liar, but the facts are the facts. There was the three-month sojourn in Los Angeles, during which my car was broken into twice: The first time, the locks were jimmied and stripped, and a duffel bag of personal documents (bills, insurance statements, diaries and notebooks filled with youthful stories and poems) vanished; the second time, the thieves urinated all over my car's upholstery. During this same period, I found myself crouching behind the kitchen counter in my tiny one-bedroom apartment at 4 a.m. while a man threw the full weight of his body against my locked door. With each successive impact, he yelled that I was a bitch and he was going to kill me. (Some divine intervention caused him to pass out moments before the police showed up; apparently he'd imbibed great quantities of a mind-altering substance and then come to torture his girlfriend, who lived upstairs.) A year or so later, in New York City, my home for most of my twenties, I walked in on a hold-up at a bodega in the far East Village. I opened the door to the store, and before I'd even crossed the threshold, I saw the bad guy, whose back was turned, and the people crouched on the floor. Somehow I was able to turn around and walk out, unscathed.

Unscathed only on the surface, however. I was left with the sort of nagging, entrenched fears that aren't easily banished by therapy or new age attitudinal adjustments. These fears, rooted as they are in lived experience, don't fade much over time. Some even grow.

In my teens and early twenties, I tried to define myself in opposition to my mother's skittishness, feigning a boldness I didn't truly feel, especially when it came to physical exploits, which I viewed as opportunities for flamboyant showing-off. I'd ski hairpin-turn slopes without a lesson. I'd ride the stomach-
plunging roller coaster until I vomited. I'd climb on the back of the motorcycle, wrap my legs around the obviously incompetent driver, and cruise down FDR Drive, electrified by fright but refusing to show it. In spite of this, I don't remember worrying that I faced, or ever would face, any real danger, either through my own impulsiveness or, perhaps more relevantly, at another's malevolent hand. I often babysat late into the night, for instance, and I don't recall a moment of nervousness. Maybe this was because my Chicago suburb was as safe as an Amish village; no one I knew had ever been the victim of a crime. Or maybe it was because my hours of after-school ballet practice meant I didn't watch the nightly news until college. Whatever the reason, I saw myself as a swaggering counterexample to my mother.

And then, after the office break-in, the climactic finale to my sketchy, crime-ridden era, I realized that something had changed. My tamped-down or laughed-off vulnerability and panic suddenly flooded back, defining me. It was as though the armor I'd been burnishing had cracked under the years of strain to expose the soft, pale flesh beneath—like the scene at the end of Return of the Jedi when Darth Vader removes his brutal mask to reveal a larvalike pate.

These days, I'm a jittery, irritatingly vigilant person. I insist that the bags go in the trunk because the car will be broken into; that the house must always be locked, lest someone be casing the joint. If I walk into a mini-mart or a restroom at a movie theater, I'm on high alert, my muscles tensed, particularly after dark.

My distress wasn't eased when R. and I moved, post break-in, to the Hollywood Hills, into a restored 1912 Craftsman that was as spooky as it was beautiful. The neighborhood, a shabby-chic melange of movie people, artists, and old-school bohemian types, was mostly gentrified, but it was perched above the seediest section of Hollywood. This meant that drunk, high, and generally shady characters often shambled into our cul-de-sac. The neighbors routinely warned of possible break-ins and informed one another if they came to pass. Several years prior, a guy posing as an air-
conditioner repairman murdered a young woman renting a house at the end of the street; the horror of it lingered like a stain.

R., who'd published a best-selling book, was out of town most of our early days in that house, on an extended lecture tour. At his busiest, he traveled three weeks a month. My memories of that year are of lonely nights spent padding around echoing, unfurnished rooms. The front of the house was composed almost entirely of uncovered windows and glass doors. When it was dark out and our lights were on, I felt like a fish in a public aquarium. I mentioned to R. that I was afraid at night and wanted to put up curtains. He said it would ruin the home's "historical look." An alarm system was installed, but no draperies. (Our eventual breakup should come as no surprise.)

Unable to sleep, I got a prodigious amount of writing done that year. But I also spent an unhealthy number of hours staring into the inky blackness of the front yard. I'd listen to the susurrus of the trees and become convinced that someone was out there rustling and whispering, that I was blind to him even as he could see me. I'd hear twigs cracking, likely from cats or raccoons, and think that it was branches breaking beneath a prowler's feet. More than once I called 911. What's bizarre is that during those nights I never remembered the gun. I didn't even know where R. stored it. It never occurred to me that a gun might quiet my blaring inner alarms.

Until last year, that is, when I moved to Montana to live with my new boyfriend, now fiancé. Montana is one of only 12 states that allow residents to carry a loaded gun in public—"open carry"—either on foot or in a vehicle, without a permit. (To carry a concealed weapon, you do need a permit, obtainable after completing a training or safety course.)

Firearms, in other words, are a seamless part of the culture here. I don't see people examining fruit in the produce aisle at Albertsons with a gun in plain sight, but I have glimpsed quite a few guns idly resting, like a map or some other quotidian object, on the dashboard of a car. People also talk about guns casually and often, the way people in New York talk about long workdays and people in L.A. talk about yoga classes. My boyfriend's father's girlfriend, a sixtysomething former stewardess who lives in Jackson Hole, tells me she keeps a pistol in her car because she often drives long stretches, crisscrossing her way between Wyoming and Arizona. Another woman I befriended, a quirky, devoutly Christian two-time divorcée in her fifties, takes her teenage son to the shooting range on weekends instead of to the movies. Leaving a sporting-goods store one evening, I pass a young couple with a yellow Labrador. "Thank you, thank you, thank you!" squeals the woman, who has frosted pink lipstick and a blond ponytail snaking down her back. "This is for my birthday, right?" She's carrying a large box containing a shotgun. As Lindsay McCrum, a photographer who published the bluntly titled book Chicks With Guns, has said: "When you get outside of the blue-state cities, everybody has a gun."

Montana's tradition of private gun ownership has long included women. Think of petticoated saloon girls tucking tiny derringers into their garter belts, or Calamity Jane, who once called home the small town where I now live. Traditions aside, there are practical reasons why a woman living here might want to own a weapon. Reasons one and two are grizzly bears and rattlesnakes, which you can encounter on a hike. Then, too, the distances between towns are vast in this sparsely populated state, the weather harsh and capricious. I've often wondered, If my car broke down in a remote area (there are many places beyond the reach of authorities, other people, or cell phone service) and someone tried to harm me under the pretext of helping, would anyone hear me scream?

The question can trouble me at home, too. Unlike R., my fiancé doesn't travel much, but when I have spent nights alone in the large commercial building where we live, I've looked out at the desolate wintry downtown streets, listened to the wind rattling the windows, and felt utterly exposed, vulnerable. In situations like these, I begin to think that having a gun in easy reach might not be the worst idea.

Last January, I sat riveted by the harrowing round-the-clock coverage of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords' shooting. The pundits focused on the breakdown of the federal background-check system: Accused gunman Jared Loughner had been suspended from college for mental problems, arrested for possession of drug paraphernalia, and rejected by the military after admitting to repeated marijuana use, yet his history came up clear when he purchased the gun. I agreed that the system had failed, but I was also absorbed by another concern. Among the bystanders was a woman named Patricia Maisch. While lying on the ground to avoid being shot, she saw Loughner, pinned down next to her by two men, reach into his pocket, pull out a "magazine," fumble, then drop it. Maisch heard someone yell, "Get the magazine!" So she reached out and snatched it. "I was able to grab it before he could," Maisch told the press. Had someone yelled the same to me, I wouldn't have had a clue what to do. I didn't know that a magazine is a detachable device that loads ammunition into a semi-automatic weapon, yet I live in a place where firearms are commonplace. It occurred to me that maybe my ignorance about guns was itself dangerous.

Around this time, I went to see my doctor. The receptionist, a doughy woman dressed in pastel scrubs, came out from her nest behind the front window to tell me, apropos of nothing, about an all-female firearms training course. Assessing me head to toe, she said, with an amiable nod that seemed to indicate she'd been analyzing me for a while: "You look like you need to learn to shoot."
I could tell by her tone that she meant to be solicitous and maternal, but her comment unnerved me. A woman I've never met is telling me I look like I need to learn to shoot? What the hell? What did she see? Perhaps, I thought, she was referring to the fact that I'm not physically prepossessing—delicately built, with bird-bone wrists and arms. Or maybe she'd fixated on my all-black, un-Montana wardrobe and determined I needed some toughening up. I must have been emitting pheromones of unease, I concluded, the way some people signal fear to dogs. I didn't want to be perceived as a human orchid. I decided to learn to shoot.

According to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, 61 percent of firearms retailers across the country reported an increase in female customers between 2009 and 2010. If you go into one of these stores or flip through a gun magazine, you'll encounter an industry pitched to women: There's pink camouflage apparel, purses designed for concealed carrying, and candy-colored guns with names like "Lavender Lady" and "Pink Cougar." ("Woe to the man who is shot by a pink gun," my boyfriend joked.) Journalists and industry experts speculate that the rise in female gun ownership owes much to the economic downturn (and an attendant concern with rising crime), as well as to the suspicion that President Obama might pass legislation restricting firearms and/or ammunition sales.

The daylong class I opt for, called Women on Target, is sponsored by the National Rifle Association and is so popular that the first time I try to register, all the spots are full. I'm forced to wait another three months. When the day finally comes, I arrive at the range at 7 a.m. to find approximately 35 women of various ages, from twentysomething to 60-plus, sitting at the sort of long fake-wood tables on which bingo is played in church basements. (The bathrooms are labeled "Does" and "Bucks.") Outside, at the rifle range, people are already shooting. Every time there's a reverberating boom, a few women jump, startled. It sounds like we're in a war zone.

Most of the women have come to this clinic so they can get a permit to carry a concealed gun for self-defense. An elderly woman tells me that she wants to stash one in her bag for shopping trips. "For the parking lot," she says.

Whether having a gun actually makes one safer is something of a statistical morass. Gun-rights advocates are fond of citing statistics showing that criminals typically operate unarmed (by some estimates, guns are used in only 31 percent of robberies and 2 percent of sexual assaults), which thus gives an advantage to citizens packing heat. They note the work of researchers such as Gary Kleck and Jongyeon Tark, whose 2004 paper in the journal Criminology analyzed data from the National Crime Victimization Survey and concluded that trying to fend off an attacker either does no harm or makes "things better for the victim" than had she not resisted. Moreover, the pair found that "forceful" behavior, such as "threatening the offender with a gun," decreases the risk of injury to the victim more than "nonforceful" resistance, like "stalling, arguing, and screaming from pain and fear." In another study that seems to bear out the deterrent effect of guns, nearly 40 percent of 1,874 prisoners reported that they'd decided not to commit a crime because they suspected a potential victim was armed.

On the other side of the corral, the National Research Council's 2004 review of the data determined that there's "no credible evidence that the passage of right-to-carry laws decreases or increases violent crime." And Duke University economist Philip J. Cook, coauthor of Gun Violence: The Real Costs, contends that studies show that guns in the home are "far more likely to end up being used to kill a member of the household (including suicide) than to kill or injure an intruder."

I'm not sure what to make of all this, but I'm relieved that the main focus of my course is safety. When John, the soft-spoken male half of "John and Connie," the married couple running the clinic, takes out an unloaded gun to demonstrate proper handling, I flinch. "Be sure of your target and what's beyond it," he tells us, turning the muzzle toward the ceiling. "And always keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot." Later, another instructor, a gray-haired grandmotherly type named Shirley who speaks with the patrician intonation of a 1930s movie star, reiterates the safety rules. "You don't want to have an accident," she says. "The people who want to get rid of the guns, that's what they talk about." She tells us she carries a revolver in her purse "in case sum'in happens."

For hands-on shooting practice, we separate into three groups: pistols, shotguns, and rifles. On my way to the pistol instruction area, I stop to ask a tall man with an NRA belt buckle for directions. "The handgun clinic is that way," he says, pointing over my head.

"I'm looking for pistols," I say.

"Honey," he tells me, with an indulgent smile, "pistols are handguns."

Most of my classmates aren't firearms virgins like me; they've shot with a husband, boyfriend, or father. I'm handed an unloaded gun. I hold it out at arm's length, like it smells bad or is poisonous. I know it's empty, but I'm afraid it's going to go off. Our instructor is a native Montanan in his forties who seems overly preoccupied with political correctness ("Ladies," he'll say, "is it okay if I correct your stance...?"); the class was supposed to be taught entirely by women, but too many students signed up. Nervously, he shows us the correct firing position and how to "sight" the gun by looking down its barrel at the target.

"Put the ammo in," he tells me.

I follow his directions. My hands start shaking. All that's left to do is shoot the damn thing. I'm intimidated—I'm petrified!—but people are watching. Peer pressure always motivates me. I squint, hold my breath, and...fire.

Fuck.

My first thought is, I can't believe how loud that was. I'm wearing earplugs, but you don't just hear the firecracker noise in your ears; you feel it with your whole body. Even if, like me, you've never handled a gun, they figure so heavily in the entertainment we watch—from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit to Sarah Palin's reality show to movie trailers and video game commercials—that firing one for the first time is a weird combination of startling and banal. Guns are (pardon the pun) loaded with so much cultural baggage that you think you know what to expect. You don't. TV gunshots sound and act no more like real gunshots than construction-paper snowflakes resemble real snowflakes.

My next thought is, I want to do that again! I have an immediate, exhilarated reaction. Partly it's that what I've just done initially frightened me, so there's a sense of a limit overcome. For many people I know, guns remain unreal—the accessories of fictional characters, or at least of the Other, not you and yours. Yet to fire a gun is to realize you can do it: You can operate one, understand how it works. Shooting gives me a rush that comes from a feeling of (admittedly incomplete) mastery.

Plus, the sensory experience of target shooting—readying your stance, controlling your breath, focusing on the target—is so absorbing that I can't indulge my free-floating worries. I can't have a self-conscious intellectual reaction when firing a gun. It's almost meditative. At one point I glimpse a woman in her sixties dressed in a white polo, creased khakis, and pristine white sneakers—attire for a day of golf at the country club; she's brandishing a Glock. I have to stop myself from laughing with delight.

As I shoot, I again experience the strange, paradoxical sense of an act that's familiar and unfamiliar at once. I've seen Clint do this; I've seen Arnold do this; I've seen Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton do it. Shooting a gun is like smoking a cigarette or drinking espresso in a café in Paris or having sex on a Caribbean beach: You've watched it so many times on-screen that you experience your own actions as an echo. It's impossible not to feel like a cliché.

A revolver now rests on my nightstand. It's small and sleek and black, a Ruger LCR. Weighing 13.5 ounces and no bigger than a half-sandwich, it's easily slipped into a purse. I've tucked it not quite out of sight, among books I hope to read but maybe never will. Several weeks after buying it, I'm still wary, superstitious. I know the chamber is empty, yet I open it every so often to check.

After the clinic, I filled out the forms for a concealed-carry permit at my local sheriff's office. The application asked for character references, and I gave the phone numbers of a few editors, amused at the thought of their bewildered reaction should someone actually call. In the section that asked why I wanted the permit, I wrote, "Personal and home defense, and because I sometimes drive alone at night when reporting." In theory, that's why I want it, and it's satisfying to think I might be able to clobber an assailant, but in reality I don't feel qualified or prepared.

Because, let's face it, if I really could fathom pulling the trigger on an intruder or a looming attacker—on another human being—I'd keep the gun loaded. When you hear floorboards creaking as he creeps toward your bedroom, it's unlikely you'll have the time, not to mention the presence of mind, to fumble with ammunition. To quote the teacher of a subsequent class I took: "When you're in trouble is not the time to start loading. It could cost you your life."

I imagine what I would have done with a gun during any of my past brushes with crime. Would I have fired it? In the end, of course, I didn't need to, but I wouldn't have known that in the moment, only after the fact. This means I might have needlessly killed or maimed someone. And yet without a gun, without the luck that turned events so unaccountably in my favor, I might have been the one killed. My ambivalence hangs in the air, a kind of reproach.

"Every time I look at the gun, it scares me," I tell my boyfriend, as I eye its insolent blackness, leering at me from the shelf next to my bed.